“Close up!” he shouted, and a soldier from the rear ranks moved into the gap. More men were going down all along the line now. If the third trumpet didn’t come soon, it would be too late. The cohort’s second-in-command was dead, and his century was struggling frantically to close their shields where the German advance had torn a ragged hole in their ranks.
“Hold, damn it!” Messala Cominius yelled. “Hold them!”
All along the slope, the front line was beginning to waver. And then they heard the third trumpet, a high, sweet note above the shrieking of the battle, and Cominius shouted “Now!” The ranks broke open and stumbled backward up the hill, as the Germans hurled themselves after them, screaming in pursuit.
Correus and his century fell back in the carefully drilled pattern that looked like a random retreat – but wasn’t. It was heavy going all the same, even though his heart pounded with relief at being out from behind that shield wall, and moving. A spear sang past him and someone shouted, “Look to the commander!” Staggering up the last of the slope, they almost fell over Cominius, sprawled on the ground with gritted teeth, pulling a spear from his thigh while his men stood above him, shields locked again now in a frantic defense.
“Get him up!” Correus shouted.
Two of Correus’s men, got their arms under Cominius and heaved him to his feet. “Take it,” Cominius panted. “The cohort – it’s yours,” and Correus saw with horror that the cohort’s third centurion was dead at his feet.
There was no time for orders, but Correus knew clearly what had to be done. The men carrying Cominius turned and ran, with the commander stumbling between them, and Correus pulled the Eighth Cohort around him and back up the hill, increasing the speed of their flight with every hundred paces. Behind them, the war host bayed like a pack of wolves, foot fighters and horsemen thundering up the hill, reddened spear points raised aloft in triumph.
* * *
“Now by Wuotan’s sword, we fight!” the chieftain of the Anglii shouted.
Nyall gathered his reins in his shield hand and settled his spear with the other. “Yes, now we fight, but you will keep to the orders I’ve given.”
“There is no honor in that! A chieftain leads his war band!”
The German footmen were closing fast on the fleeing cohorts. “Our vassals will have the honor,” another man shouted, “and we will be fools and cowards!”
“You are fools!” Nyall shouted back, his face furious. “That isn’t their whole force. There are reserves behind those trees, and maybe on the flanks!”
But the retreat seemed to be becoming a rout; the Romans were apparently driven back on their own reserves, and Nyall couldn’t hold his chieftains. Even Hoskuld, fire in his eye, gripped his spear and dug his heels into his horse’s flank. There was glory only in the forefront of a charge, and disgrace behind, and honor had a louder voice than obedience.
“No!” Nyall grabbed at the Anglii chieftain’s bridle and the man snarled and spun his horse away.
“We’ve waited long enough! Now we take the Romans’ heads our own way!”
They poured up the hill, howling for blood, blood to wash away the disgrace of being held behind, and even the flankers pulled in and followed them, to cut down fleeing Romans and take a fine red revenge for the slaughtered folk of Jorunnshold.
Then a fourth trumpet sounded, and the Twenty-second Legion came around the left slope of the hill at a dead run. The front ranks flung their pilums and knelt down as the rear ranks came through to throw theirs, and German riders and foot fighters went down together in a chaos of splintered shields and speared horses. The Twenty-second locked shields and came on, opened ranks to throw the second volley, and closed again as they hit the Germans’ left flank with a crash. The flank turned to fight, but buckled in on the center, and the Twenty-second drew its swords as one man, stabbed, closed ranks, and advanced again through the crumpled dead and abandoned shields of the Germans. As many warriors had lost their shields as had died in that terrible volley of pilums. The soft iron heads were heavy and bent when they struck, and a shield with that weight embedded in it was uncontrollable. The archers of the Twenty-second spread out on the wing uphill and sent flight after flight over their own men’s heads and into the German flank.
In the German center the charge began to lose its momentum as the weakened flank fell back, jamming them together. The Eighth Legion opened its ranks for the fleeing cohorts and closed behind them with a snap of shields. There was no pretense of retreat now. The German advance, battle order abandoned in their reckless pursuit, and the flank pushed back on the center, broke at the crest of the hill under another murderous rain of pilums.
Correus, his breath coming in gasps as he pulled the Eighth Cohort together around him in the rear, could hear the shouted orders as the Eighth Legion and the Twenty-second pushed relentlessly at the German war host and the Germans screamed and fought back with sword and spear, struggling to hold the sloping ground. He took a deep breath and nodded to the two other centurions left to the cohort.
“Now. Hook on to the right between our lads and the Twenty-second – and push.”
The Seventh and Ninth Cohorts were on either side of them, the seeming chaos of the retreat now vanished utterly and each man of each century back in his accustomed slot. It was the shield of the legions, Correus thought as they moved into the line again – that parade-ground formation drilled and drilled into them until they could have done it blind.
Then there was no time to think about anything but stab and advance, stab and advance, struggling to push the Germans slowly in on their own center, while the Twenty-second Legion tore an ever greater hole in the broken left flank. The cohort standard rode above the dust and blood at his side. His cohort now, if only for this battle.
Correus stabbed desperately as a screaming German, his blond hair flying and his sword blade red to the hilt, seemed to rise up out of the ground before him. The German, aiming for the left side, the shield side, met Correus’s sword instead and went down at his feet. There was blood everywhere… blood on their hands, blood on the ground. The Germans were jammed hopelessly together, the horsemen riding down their own men, and only the front ranks were able to fight back. Even the long spears were only encumbrance at close quarters, and the rear ranks were packed too tightly to use them. Correus thought he saw Nyall in the thick of it, on a plunging roan, desperately shouting orders that went unheard. Then the German left broke completely and he lost sight of Nyall as the cohort surged down the hill, trampling the German dead under their feet.
The Roman left and center began to move forward too, and the trumpets sounded for the final time. It was the centurions’ war now. Wherever there was a space, they led their men into it, hacking open great gaps in the German front, driving their short swords in against helpless spearmen. The German riders were sword-armed, but they were scattered among the foot troops. The Romans tucked their shields over their heads and cut the riders’ horses out from under them. The German lines gave way completely, but it was impossible to retreat in the massed chaos that had been Nyall’s battle line.
“Primigenia!”
“Augusta!”
The Romans came in for the kill, screaming the names of their legions for a war cry.
* * *
By midday it was ended. There was nothing left but German dead… dead men and dead horses stacked three deep in a tangle of broken shields, useless spears still in their hands. The few that had escaped had fled with the Roman cavalry on their tails to hunt them down in twos and threes among the hills. By the time the legate called off the pursuit, the only movement on the hillside was the slow, black circling of carrion birds above the field. Of the Romans, the dead numbered three hundred. Of the war band that was to have broken Rome’s hold on the Rhenus, ten thousand.
XXII End and Beginning
Calpurnius Rufinus sat wearily on his horse with the legate of the Twenty-second Primigenia beside him and looked out over the battlefie
ld.
“Rome will never go beyond the Agri Decumates,” he said. “Nyall succeeded in that at least. I wonder if it was worth it to him, in the end.”
“So many dead,” the legate of the Twenty-second said. “For something that might never have happened.”
“Don’t deceive yourself, my friend. If Barbarian Germany had been easy pickings, we would have picked it long ago. No, we’d have gone beyond, no matter what I swore to Nyall, if we could have. But we’ve only half-consolidated the Agri Decumates, and there are more tribes than the Suevi beyond it. They’d fight too, and eventually they’d learn what Nyall was beginning to. If you fight barbarians too often, you end by teaching your enemy how to make war. If we’d faced disciplined troops today…”
The legate of the Twenty-second nodded. It could have gone the other way – easily. “Still, the Emperor has begun to trust us here,” he said. “At least he gave us the reinforcement we asked for.”
Rufinus shook his head. “It would take the Lower German legions joined to ours to hold the frontier if we went beyond the Agri Decumates, and he’ll never give us that.”
“‘Too many legions too close to Rome—’” the other said, plainly quoting.
“‘—breed too much temptation,’” Rufinus finished. “It’s Rome’s fear of the strength of her own army that really sets Rome’s limits in Germany.” He looked down at the endless wave of dead that stretched away over the hillside. “Nyall’s shade can have that to laugh at, if he can find the heart.”
* * *
Correus sat on a flat rock with his knees drawn up under his chin, watching the burial party in the flat land below as they tumbled the stiffening bodies into row after row of common graves. They are destroyed, he thought. A whole nation gone, for one man’s refusal to treat with Rome. And Rome had not even attacked them. It had been Rome’s mere presence here that had sparked this carnage. Correus shuddered. He felt like a leper.
He was putting off telling the legate that they had not been able to find Nyall’s body. As the most junior of those who knew the Semnone chieftain by sight, Correus had drawn that grisly duty and had known better than to protest. The legate wanted Nyall’s corpse to hammer home a point to the other tribes whose lands bordered on the Agri Decumates – unpleasant, but necessary. But that had proved impossible. He was there, of course, but there were ten thousand dead, many mangled beyond recognition. At last, Correus had given up. He had found four that could be identified fairly certainly from their wealth of gold jewelry as chieftains of the Suevi. There had been old men and boys in their teens, and even a few women, and one dark-faced man with a Roman centurion’s twenty-year ring on his hand. They had puzzled greatly over that before they had tipped him into the pit with the rest.
Now, sickened by an endless parade of corpses, Correus didn’t want to talk to the legate or anyone else. He took his helmet off and set it on the ground beside him, letting the clean breeze wash over his face.
“Are you all right, sir?”
He looked up. It was Quintus, black with dirt and with a piece of bloody rag tied around his thigh. “Yes, thank you.” His eyes focused on the rag. “Are you hurt? You should be in the hospital.”
“It’s only a scratch, sir. Surgeon’s got worse to deal with first.”
Correus turned his face back toward the rows of open graves, and Quintus stood at his shoulder, also watching. “And the men?” Correus asked finally. The Roman losses had been light, but most of them had come from the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth cohorts.
“We lost near a hundred, sir,” Quintus said sadly, and Correus grimaced. Nearly one man in five. “The commander’s still with us, though,” Quintus said. “He was in the hospital tent, swearing a blue streak while they washed his leg out with vinegar. He sent me to find you.”
Correus nodded. “And the other cohorts? The Seventh and Ninth?”
“Near as bad, sir, and more wounded, same as us. Your brother’s all right,” he added. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“Thank you, Quintus.” The breeze stirred up and it felt cold and clammy. “It was good of you to find out.”
He should get up, he knew, and report to Cominius and the legate, and find Flavius.
The sun was low and the dying light caught him full in the face. Quintus peered at him. “You don’t look so good, sir. Sit there until you get your breath, like.” He went on. “I damn near started to report to your brother, you look so much alike, until I saw it wasn’t you. Would you be twins, sir?”
“We don’t even have the same mother.”
Quintus whistled. “The old man’s influence must have been strong.”
* * *
In the hospital tent, Messala Cominius lay with his leg propped up on a cot and glared at the junior surgeon, Lucanus, as he pinned a clean bandage around it. “That will do,” he said as Lucanus pushed the last pin home. “I’m not an Egyptian mummy. Now get lost.” He looked up at Correus. “You look like a sewer rat.”
“A graveyard rat,” Correus said shortly, and explained his recent task.
Cominius winced. “No wonder you look sick. Sit down, Julianus, if you can find a place.”
Correus looked around but nothing offered itself, so he sat on the dirt floor.
“You did a good job,” Cominius said. “I’ve recommended you for promotion to cohort rank.”
Correus blinked. “Cohort rank?”
“You’ll serve out the rest of this season as my second until a new posting comes through. And I’m going to have to promote at least one junior centurion from the ranks. Have you got any suggestions?”
Correus took a deep breath. “Quintus, sir.”
“Quintus?”
“Yes, sir. He… he only makes trouble when he’s got nothing to do,” Correus explained.
Cominius snorted. “Very well, I’ll consider it. Now get out of here. Go report to Rufinus and then go to bed. Get the men settled first,” he added. “They’re your joy until they let me out of here.”
Correus stood up and saluted numbly. Cohort rank… Tomorrow it would probably seem real. Tonight he had to go count dead bodies for the legate.
* * *
When the full moon was up, three men crept from a cleft in the rocks and lifted a fourth man after them by thighs and shoulders onto a makeshift litter fashioned from a cloak lashed to two spears. They set off down a narrow track through the trees that was little more than a deer trail. The moon came through the light cover of new leaves and illuminated their faces: pale, bloodstained, with the look of the hunted.
The man on the litter moaned, and the one who walked beside him put out a hand to quiet him.
“Kari?”
The man beside him laid a hand on his shoulder, but didn’t speak.
“Kari!” The man on the litter tried to sit up.
Ranvig pushed Nyall back as gently as he could. “Here, brother,” he lied in a soft whisper, and the wounded man grew quiet.
The man who carried the front poles of the litter spoke to Ranvig over his shoulder. “Where are we going, lord?”
“North.”
“Aye, lord, but where is there to go?”
They might make Nyallshold before they were caught, but he doubted it. “I don’t know,” Ranvig said. “Just… north.”
They trudged wearily along the track. Tomorrow they would have to eat, Ranvig thought, and Nyall’s wounds would have to be cleaned again. That and staying hidden were the things to worry about. If they made it… then he would tell Nyall that he had lied to him.
* * *
My dearest Julia,
Things are very quiet now. The German war band that was threatening the frontier is beaten. Massacred would probably be a better word, but I will spare you the description I had from your brother Correus. If you’re going to live with me, my sweet, you’ll have to get used to being in the thick of such things, but I see no reason to start you off quite so grimly. Your brothers are both well, and although they didn’t exact
ly win the battle single-handedly, they were both in the worst part of it and came off with honors. Correus has been promoted to second-in-command of his cohort, and the word is that he will have a cohort of his own by the end of the year. Flavius has been promoted also, to third centurion of his cohort – like Correus’s, a battlefield promotion. And very commendable. We lost four centurions and over two hundred men from a three-cohort advance line. The army’s losses overall were minimal, but if you happen to be one of them, I don’t expect that’s much comfort. At any rate, your brothers are both paying for their promotions by breaking in the new recruits sent out to bring those cohorts up to strength. Centurion Silvanus, whom I may have mentioned to you, is also among the living and has just got a posting to his own cohort command. We are giving him a royal send-off tonight (I have taken to following the legion about once more, and the legate kindly tolerates my presence – until things start getting hot again, at least) so I will finish this letter to you before I get too drunk to write. Tullius sends his regards and asks “if Little Miss will bring her servants with her.” I strongly suspect him of having designs on your maid, so you are warned.
My dearest girl, I cannot tell you how much I want you with me. I shall be back in Rome by the end of this season’s campaign, and shall return bearing bride-gifts and, I hope, a marriage contract. My lawyers have been communing with your father’s lawyers like a pack of diplomats drawing up a treaty, and they keep sending me lengthy letters full of settlements and entails and exclusions, until I finally wrote and said I only wanted to get married, not set up a national constitution. I told them to settle half of what I have on you now, and the other half in the event of my death, and they wrote back and said what about divorce, and what about children? I wrote back and said there weren’t any children, and we could always amend those things later. But it didn’t do any good. I suppose the lawyers will settle it to suit them and then we can get married. If you ever divorce me, I shan’t care anyway.
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